Where growth breaks: lead follow-up
Lead volume is up. Revenue isn't.
Marketing says the leads are there. The sales floor says they're not good enough. Both are working from different numbers, and the revenue is leaking somewhere in between.
What's usually behind it.
The leak is usually after the lead arrives. Appointments set but not kept. Estimates written and never followed up. Follow-up that stops after one try.
Nobody owns the stretch between the appointment and the signed contract, so nobody sees it.
First, make every lead worth calling.
approved work on 18% fewer leads.
How I approach it.
I follow each lead source through every stage to the sale and find where it drops. Then we fix the stage, not the volume: speed to first contact, kept appointments, and follow-up reps will actually do.
More leads only help if they're the kind that buy. A lead is a person with some amount of intent, not a row in a report. When we cut the blog traffic that never bought and mapped every source to where it really came from, the same channel produced twice the buyers, and that's the volume worth growing.
Sometimes the right move is fewer leads from better sources. If it is, I'll show you the math to defend it upward.
Same channel. Twice the buyers, once the junk was gone.
search leads reaching approved work, once the junk was gone.
Proof
Most companies write old leads off. I built the follow-up that brought them back.
These buyers weren't cold. They were worn out and stuck. Once someone reopened the conversation and they trusted the job would be done right, they were ready to move. Reclaimed leads sold through at a stronger rate, and customers had a better experience.
Behind it: follow-up on a set schedule, a program for older leads, and a tool built with AI that drafts each rep's email, text and voicemail and coaches them on why each one works.
Search leads reached approved work at 4.3 times the rate of third-party leads.
Where else growth breaks.
More leads is the easiest number to buy and the least useful one to report.